Dear Christina,
       Excuse me butting in with a burble, but I confess I have a bit of a
prejudice against 'dream' poetry. When someone tells me what an interesting
dream they had last night, my heart sinks the same way as when someone
produces a wad of holidays snaps.
    Basically I think because whatever 'messages' are in dreams, the
meanings are very personal. If I read a poem, somewhere underneath it I'm
expecting the intention to communicate something to me. A dream is something
we communicate to ourselves -it has to be interpreted thorough channels of
experience that won't probably be open to anyone else.
Having said that, of course some dreams are interesting, and can communicate
general anxieties, as I think this poem does. But the knowledge that it's a
dream does 'distance' it from the reader in a certain way -dunno if anything
I've said makes sense...
Kind regards,
  grasshoppper
----- Original Message -----
From: Christina Fletcher
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Sunday, January 26, 2003 3:43 PM
Subject: Re: [THE-WORKS] New sub: Flight (Terri)


Mmm, now that's got me thinking.  Why does it colour your appreciation and
how?  Doesn't most poetry/art have it's roots in the subconscious to some
extent?  I saw a very disturbing painting on Friday: a self portrait by
someone I know who's a professional artist (whatever that might mean).  She
works in a very objective way: from nature trying to make marks that
approximate as closely as possible to what she sees and she's usually quite
'good'.  The self portrait was incredibly awful - badly drawn, muddy
colours.  Finally, she slashed the canvas.  But then she started to stitch
it together with thick red silk.  It's a disturbing as anything I've seen
anywhere.  If she'd had a dream in which she did this and then
painted/slashed/stitched it, would it be any different from the point of
view of the observer?  How would knowing something was a dream make the
content/interpretation d! ifferent?
bw
christina



I wish you hadn't told me it was a dreampoem - that knowledge colours my
whole appreciation of it. If that were ambiguous, it might feel a lot more
real/crazy.